Techie Stuff

the GUI

In this article I will show you how to seamlessly integrate this with Opera. You will never ever want to miss this again ;)

With the new release of Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn) the Network Manager has become the standard way of connecting to wireless (and wired) networks in Ubuntu.

While this new way has some drawbacks (connection is only established on login, so time doesn't get synced with the internet on startup) it is a great way for all the Linux roadwarriors to easily connect to all sorts of networks. In this mini-howto I will show you how it is done. I will also show you how to automatically connect after the login without needing to enter your gnome-keyring password.

Alright everyone. I admit I have abandoned this site for quite a while but this stops now ;-). For my first post in a while, let me share with you what I did to make my favourite browser even better and more useful.

I've created a set of buttons which you can add to your Opera browser. I made these out of bookmarklets, so if you don't use Opera (which would be a shame) you can still use the regular bookmarklets with your browser. These are the buttons:

And this is what they do (just click on the titles to add the buttons to Opera or drag and drop the bookmarklet-links on your Firefox bookmarks bar):

Post to del.icio.us

Post the current page to your del.icio.us bookmarks. del.icio.us is a very cool service that lets you save sites you come across to their online service and easily access them or share them with friends. Once you tried it you will never want to miss it again! (bookmarklet)

BugMeNot

If a site requires you to log in to continue (i.e. nytimes.com) simply click this button to get a username and password immediately. Very cool because you can avoid annoying registrations. (bookmarklet)

Search this domain

If you ever had the problem that the search on the site (i.e. newspaper) you are currently viewing sucks, use this button to do a google-search on the current site only. (bookmarklet)

TinyURL

if you want to send the currently open address to someone and it's very long... just make it tiny! (bookmarklet)

direc.tor

A unique way of organizing your delicious bookmarks ajax style (bookmarklet)

The last one (direc.tor) is especially cool. It allows you to search-as-you-type in all your del.icio.us bookmarks and has a nice tag-browser. Take a look at the following screenshot to see how it works.

click to enlarge

One last thing: You don't get those nice icons for the new buttons automatically. They have to be added to the skin you are using. If you use the default skin of Opera you can just use my modified version of it: Version for Opera before 9.5 / Version for Opera 9.5 Kestrel (click to install). To make use of the new icons you will also need a different set of buttons. Use these:

I know this article is similar to one I have written before. But since there are some additions and changes I figured I might just reciycle it ;-)

Cheers,
Matthias

Currently, the only feature packed Bittorrent client available in Linux is Azureus. Azureus is great but it has a huge downside. Their developers apparently don't know how to make use of Java's and SWT's speed and there are huge memory leaks. On slow systems this makes using Azureus a pain in the a**.

Windows users have their great µTorrent. Micro-sized and (almost) as feature-rich as Azureus. The bad news is - there is no Linux version, yet. ludde, µTorrent's Swedish developer promised there will be one. I trust he can do it since he already showed his cross-platform dev-skills with his other well-known project ScummVM (which he doesn't maintain anymore). Well, right now we still have to live without a Linux version of µTorrent but the good news is: You can easily run the Windows version using wine. This is what I'm going to explain now. I will show it for Ubuntu but it works simularly for any other distri.

Everyone has been talking about Ubuntu for the past year. I have been using it exclusively for a little more than half a year now and recently switched over to the new version. So I thought it's just about time to tell you what I think about Ubuntu. This is not going to be a complete review but a subjective opinion with screenshots.